Tafsir as Mystical Experience: Intimacy and Ecstasy in Quran Commentary

Lawson shows how the Quran may be engaged with for meaning and understanding, the usual goal of mystical exegesis, and also how it may be engaged with through tafsīr in a quest for spiritual or mystical experience. In this earliest of the Báb’s extended works, written before his public claim to be the return of the hidden Imam, the act of reading is shown to be something akin to holy communion in which the sacred text is both entrance upon and destination of the mystic quest. The Quran here is a door to an “abode of glory” and an abiding spiritual encounter with the divine through the prophet, his daughter Fāṭima and the twelve Imams of Ithna-ʿasharī Shiʿism who inhabit the letters, words, verses and suras of the Book.

The cover calligraphy, by Burhan Zahrai, is of Qur’án 53, the Súrat al-najm or Chapter of the Star, verse 11: مَا كَذَبَ الْفُؤَادُ مَا رَأَىٰ “The heart lied not of what it saw.”